by P. D. James
He said nothing for the moment, and when he did speak I had to strain my ears to hear.
“I planned it, God help me. I planned it, but it was fate. If it was meant to be, then it would be.”
The words meant little at the time, but later, when I was older, I think I understood what he was saying. It was one way, perhaps the necessary way, to absolve himself from responsibility. That push hadn’t been the overwhelming impulse of the moment. He had planned the deed, had chosen the place and the time. He knew exactly what he meant to do. But so much had been outside his control. He couldn’t be sure that Mr. Michaelmass would want to leave the car, or that he would stand so conveniently close to the edge of the cliff. He couldn’t be sure that the darkness would be so absolute or that I would stand sufficiently apart. And one thing had worked against him; he hadn’t known about my torch. If the attempt had failed, would he have tried again? Who can know? It was one of the many questions I never asked him.
He opened the rear door for me, suddenly standing upright, a deferential chauffeur doing his job. As I got in I turned and said, “We must stop at the first police station and let them know what has happened. Leave the talking to me. And we’d better say that it was Mr. Michaelmass, not you, who wanted to stop the car.”
I look back now with some disgust at my childish arrogance. The words had the force of a command. If he resented it he made no sign. And he did leave the talking to me, merely quietly confirming my story. I told it first at the police station in the small Dorset town which we reached within fifteen minutes. Memory is always disjointed, episodic. Some impulse of the mind presses the button and, like a colour transparency, the picture is suddenly thrown on the screen, vivid, immobile, a glowing instant fixed in time between the long stretches of dark emptiness. At the police station I remember a tall lamp with the snowflakes swirling out of darkness to die like moths against the glass, a huge coal fire in a small office which smelt of furniture polish and coffee, a Sergeant, huge, imperturbable, taking down the details, the heavy oilskin capes of the policemen as they stamped out to begin the search. I had decided precisely what I would say.
“Mr. Michaelmass told Carter to stop the car and we got out. He said it was a call of nature. Carter and I went to the left by a large boulder and Mr. Michaelmass walked ahead. It was so dark we didn’t see him after that. We both waited for him, I suppose for about five minutes, but he still didn’t appear. Then I took out my torch and we explored. We could just see his footsteps to the edge of the cliff but they were getting very faint. We still hung around and called, but he didn’t reappear, so we knew what had happened.”
The Sergeant said, “Hear anything, did you?”
I was tempted to say, “Well I did think I heard one sharp cry, but I thought it could be a bird,” but I resisted the temptation. Would there be a seagull flying in that darkness? Better to keep the story simple and stick to it. I have sent a number of men down for life because they have neglected that simple rule.
The Sergeant said that he would organise a search, but that there was little chance of finding any trace of Mr. Michaelmass that night. They would have to wait for first light. He added, “And if he went over where I think he did, we may not retrieve the body for weeks.” He took the addresses of my grandmother and the school and let us go.
I have no clear memory of our arrival at the manor, perhaps because recollection is overshadowed by what happened next morning. Carter, of course, breakfasted with the servants while I was in the dining room with my grandmother. We were still in the middle of our toast and marmalade when the parlour-maid announced that the Chief Constable, Colonel Neville, had called. My grandmother asked that he be shown into the library, and left the dining room immediately. Less than a quarter of an hour later I was summoned.
And now my memory is sharp and clear, every word remembered as if it were yesterday. My grandmother was sitting in a high-backed leather chair before the fire. It had only recently been lit and the room struck me as chill. The wood was still crackling and the coals hadn’t yet caught fire. There was a large desk set in the middle of the room where my grandfather used to work, and the Chief Constable was sitting behind it. In front of it stood Carter, rigid as a soldier called before his commanding officer. And on the desk, precisely placed in front of the Colonel, was the red yo-yo.
Carter turned briefly as I entered and gave me one single look. Our eyes held for no more than three seconds before he turned away but I saw in his eyes—how could I not?—that wild mixture of fear and pleading. I have seen it many times since from prisoners in the dock awaiting the pronouncement of my sentence, and I have never been able to encounter it with equanimity. Carter needn’t have worried; I had relished too much the power of that first decision, the heady satisfaction of being in control, to think of betraying him now or ever. And how could I betray him? Wasn’t I now his accomplice in guilt?
Colonel Neville was stern-faced. He said, “I want you to listen to my questions very carefully and tell me the exact truth.”
My grandmother said, “Charlcourts don’t lie.”
“I know that, I know that.” He kept his eyes on me. “Do you recognise this yo-yo?”
“I think so, Sir, if it’s the same one.”
My grandmother broke in. “It was found on the edge of the cliff where Mr. Michaelmass fell. Carter says that it isn’t his. Is it yours?”
She shouldn’t have spoken, of course. And I wondered at the time why the Chief Constable should have allowed her to be present at the interview. Later I realised that he had had no choice. Even in those less child-centred times a juvenile would not have been questioned without a responsible adult present. The Colonel’s frown of displeasure at the intervention was so brief that I almost missed it. But I didn’t miss it. I was alive, gloriously alive, to every nuance, every gesture.
I said, “Carter is telling the truth, Sir. It isn’t his. It’s mine. He gave it to me before we started out. While we were waiting for Mr. Michaelmass.”
“Gave it to you? Why should he do that?” My grandmother’s voice was sharp. I turned towards her.
“He said it was because I’d been kind to Timmy. Timmy is his son. The boys rag him rather.”
The Colonel’s voice had changed. “Was this yo-yo in your possession when Mr. Michaelmass fell to his death?”
I looked him straight in the eyes. “No, Sir. Mr. Michaelmass confiscated it during the journey. He saw me fiddling with it and asked me how I came by it. I told him and he took it from me. He said, ‘Whatever the other boys may choose to do, a Charlcourt should know that pupils don’t take presents from a servant.’ ”
I had subconsciously mimicked Mr. Michaelmass’s dry sarcastic tone and the words came out with utterly convincing verisimilitude. But they probably would have believed me anyway. Why not? A Charlcourt doesn’t lie.
The Colonel asked, “And what did Mr. Michaelmass do with the yo-yo when he’d confiscated it?”
“He put it in his coat pocket, Sir.”
The Chief Constable leant back in his chair and looked over at my grandmother. “Well, that’s plain enough. It’s obvious what happened. He made some adjustments to his clothing…”
He paused, perhaps feeling some delicacy, but my grandmother was made of tougher metal. She said, “Perfectly plain. He walked away from Carter and the boy not realising that he was dangerously close to the cliff edge. He took off his gloves to undo his flies and stuffed the gloves in his pockets. When he pulled them out again the yo-yo fell. He wouldn’t hear it on the snow. Then, disorientated by the darkness, he took a step in the wrong direction, slipped and fell.”
Colonel Neville turned to Carter. “It was a stupid place to stop, but you weren’t to know that.”
Carter said, through lips almost as white as his face, “Mr. Michaelmass asked me to stop the car, Sir.”
“Of course, of course, I realise that. It wasn’t your place to argue. You’ve made your statement. There’s no reason for you to s
tay on here. You’d better get back to the school and your duties. You’ll be needed for the inquest, but that probably won’t be for some time. We haven’t found the body yet. And pull yourself together, man. It wasn’t your fault. I suppose by not saying at once that you’d given the yo-yo to the boy you were trying to protect him. It was quite unnecessary. You should have told the whole truth, just as it happened. Concealing facts always leads to trouble. Remember that in future.”
Carter said, “Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir,” turned quietly and left.
When the door had closed behind him, Colonel Neville got up from his chair and moved over to the fire, standing with his back to it, rocking gently on his heels and looking down at my grandmother. They seemed to have forgotten my presence. I moved over to the door and stood there quietly beside it, but I didn’t leave.
The Chief Constable said, “I didn’t want to mention it while Carter was here, but you don’t think there’s any possibility that he jumped?”
My grandmother’s voice was calm. “A suicide? It did cross my mind. It was odd that he told the boy to go over to the boulder and he walked on into the darkness alone.”
The Colonel said, “A natural wish for privacy, perhaps.”
“I suppose so.” She paused, then went on, “He lost his wife and a child, you know. Soon after they married. Killed in a car crash. He was driving at the time. He never got over it. I don’t think anything mattered to him after that, except perhaps his teaching. My son says that he was one of the most gifted men of his year at Oxford. Everyone predicted a brilliant academic career for him. And what did he end up doing? Stuck in a prep school wasting his talent on small boys. Perhaps he saw it as some kind of penance.”
The Colonel asked, “No relations?”
“None, as far as I know.”
The Colonel continued, “I won’t raise the possibility of suicide at the inquest, of course. Unfair to his memory. And there isn’t a shred of proof. Accidental death is far more likely. It will be a loss for the school, of course. Was he popular with the boys?”
My grandmother said, “I shouldn’t think so. Highly unlikely, I would have said. They’re all barbarians at that age.”
I slipped out of the door, still unobserved.
I began to grow up during that Christmas week. I realised for the first time the insidious temptations of power, the exhilaration of feeling in control of people and events, the power of patronage. And I learnt another lesson, best expressed by Henry James. “Never say you know the last word about any human heart.” Who would have believed that Mr. Michaelmass had once been a devoted father, a loving husband? I like to believe that the knowledge made me a better lawyer, a more compassionate judge, but I’m not sure. The essential self is fixed well before the thirteenth birthday. It may be influenced by experience but it is seldom changed.
Carter and I never spoke about the murder again, not even when we attended the inquest together seven weeks later. Back at school we hardly saw each other; after all, I was a pupil, he a servant. I shared the snobbery of my caste. And what Carter and I shared was a secret, not a friendship, not a life. But I would occasionally watch him pacing the side of the rugger field, his hands twitching as if there was something he missed.
And did it answer? A moralist, I suppose, would expect us both to be racked with guilt and the new master to be worse than Mr. Michaelmass. But he wasn’t. The headmaster’s wife was not without influence, and I can imagine her saying, “He was a wonderful teacher, of course, but not really popular with the boys. Perhaps, dear, you could find someone a little gentler, and a man we don’t have to feed during the holidays.”
So Mr. Wainwright came, a nervous, newly qualified teacher. He didn’t torment us—but we tormented him. A boys’ prep school, after all, is a microcosm of the world outside. But he took trouble with Timmy, giving him special care, perhaps because Timmy was the only boy who didn’t bully him. And Timmy blossomed under his loving patience.
And the murder answered in another way—or I suppose you could argue that it did. Three years later the war broke out and Carter joined up immediately. He was one of the most decorated Sergeants of the war, awarded the Victoria Cross for pulling three of his comrades out of their burning tank. He was killed at the battle of El Alamein and his name is carved on the school war memorial, a fitting gesture to the great democracy of death.
And the yo-yo? I replaced it in the box among the school reports, the old essays and those letters from my parents which I thought might interest my son or my grandchildren. Finding it, will he briefly wonder what happy childhood memory made an old man so reluctant to throw it away?
The Victim
You know Princess Ilsa Mancelli, of course. I mean by that that you must have seen her on the cinema screen; on television; pictured in newspapers arriving at airports with her latest husband; relaxing on their yacht; bejewelled at first nights, gala nights, at any night and in any place where it is obligatory for the rich and successful to show themselves. Even if, like me, you have nothing but bored contempt for what I believe is called the international jet set, you can hardly live in the modern world and not know Ilsa Mancelli. And you can’t fail to have picked up some scraps about her past. The brief and not particularly successful screen career, when even her heart-stopping beauty couldn’t quite compensate for the paucity of talent; the succession of marriages—first to the producer who made her first film and who broke a twenty-year-old marriage to get her; then to a Texan millionaire; lastly to a prince. About two months ago I saw a nauseatingly sentimental picture of her with her two-day-old son in a Rome nursing home. So it looks as if this marriage, sanctified as it is by wealth, a title and maternity, may be intended as her final adventure.
The husband before the film producer is, I notice, no longer mentioned. Perhaps her publicity agent fears that a violent death in the family, particularly an unsolved violent death, might tarnish her bright image. Blood and beauty. In the early stages of her career they hadn’t been able to resist that cheap, vicarious thrill. But not now. Nowadays her early history, before she married the film producer, has become a little obscure, although there is a suggestion of poor but decent parentage and early struggles suitably rewarded. I am the most obscure part of that obscurity. Whatever you know, or think you know, of Ilsa Mancelli, you won’t have heard about me. The publicity machine has decreed that I be nameless, faceless, unremembered, that I no longer exist. Ironically, the machine is right; in any real sense, I don’t.
I married her when she was Elsie Bowman aged seventeen. I was assistant librarian at our local branch library and fifteen years older, a thirty-two-year-old virgin, a scholar manqué, thin-faced, a little stooping, my meagre hair already thinning. She worked on the cosmetic counter of our High Street store. She was beautiful then, but with a delicate, tentative, unsophisticated loveliness which gave little promise of the polished mature beauty which is hers today. Our story was very ordinary. She returned a book to the library one evening when I was on counter duty. We chatted. She asked my advice about novels for her mother. I spent as long as I dared finding suitable romances for her on the shelves. I tried to interest her in the books I liked. I asked her about herself, her life, her ambitions. She was the only woman I had been able to talk to. I was enchanted by her, totally and completely besotted.
I used to take my lunch early and make surreptitious visits to the store, watching her from the shadow of a neighbouring pillar. There is one picture which even now seems to stop my heart. She had dabbed her wrist with scent and was holding out a bare arm over the counter so that a prospective customer could smell the perfume. She was entirely absorbed, her young face gravely preoccupied. I watched her, silently, and felt the tears smarting my eyes.
It was a miracle when she agreed to marry me. Her mother (she had no father) was reconciled if not enthusiastic about the match. She didn’t, as she made it abundantly plain, consider me much of a catch. But I had a good job with prospects; I was educated; I was stead
y and reliable; I spoke with a grammar-school accent which, while she affected to deride it, raised my status in her eyes. Besides, any marriage for Elsie was better than none. I was dimly aware when I bothered to think about Elsie in relation to anyone but myself that she and her mother didn’t get on.
Mrs. Bowman made, as she described it, a splash. There was a full choir and a peal of bells. The church hall was hired and a sit-down meal, ostentatiously unsuitable and badly cooked, was served to eighty guests. Between the pangs of nervousness and indigestion I was conscious of smirking waiters in short white jackets, a couple of giggling bridesmaids from the store, their freckled arms bulging from pink taffeta sleeves, hearty male relatives, red-faced and with buttonholes of carnation and waving fern, who made indelicate jokes and clapped me painfully between the shoulders. There were speeches and warm champagne. And, in the middle of it all, Elsie, my Elsie, like a white rose.
I suppose that it was stupid of me to imagine that I could hold her. The mere sight of our morning faces, smiling at each other’s reflection in the bedroom mirror, should have warned me that it couldn’t last. But, poor deluded fool, I never dreamed that I might lose her except by death. Her death I dared not contemplate, and I was afraid for the first time of my own. Happiness had made a coward of me. We moved into a new bungalow, chosen by Elsie, sat in new chairs chosen by Elsie, slept in a befrilled bed chosen by Elsie. I was so happy that it was like passing into a new phase of existence, breathing a different air, seeing the most ordinary things as if they were newly created. One isn’t necessarily humble when greatly in love. Is it so unreasonable to recognise the value of a love like mine, to believe that the beloved is equally sustained and transformed by it?
She said that she wasn’t ready to start a baby and, without her job, she was easily bored. She took a brief training in shorthand and typing at our local technical college and found herself a position as shorthand typist at the firm of Collingford and Major. That, at least, was how the job started. Shorthand typist, then secretary to Mr. Rodney Collingford, then personal secretary, then confidential personal secretary; in my bemused state of uxorious bliss I only half-registered her progress from occasionally taking his dictation when his then secretary was absent to flaunting his gifts of jewellery and sharing his bed.
